Return to Drawing Drills

Concept artist Peter Han demonstrates drawing drills on a YouTube video.

Synchronicity has struck again!

While watching these Stan Prokopenko interviews with accomplished artists at Comic Con in San Diego, I was struck by how several of them said that the most basic of drawing drills should be done regularly, regardless of your experience and current skill level.

The drills they're talking about are the same drills I have done on and off over the last couple of years but always abandoned because I didn't see much use in them.

But hearing MULTIPLE artists say that these drills are essential to improving drawing skills, I dove back into them. I'm now doing a combination of Scott Robertson drills, Peter Han drills and Irshad Karim drills.

For the copying drills, I recommend drawing the original lines in pencil and using a black or other colored pen to draw over the line. With the difference in color between the graphite and the pen, it's easier to see your drawn line. For the other exercises, I use templates that I created templates and print when needed.

Here are the drills I try to do regularly:

1.  Straight lines, maintaining the same length and the same space between them (Oops, I didn't save an example of this!)

2. Draw over short, medium and long straight lines, three times each line:

I fit the draw-over-straight-lines drill on the same page as the short- and medium-draw-over-arcs drill.

3. Draw over short, medium and long arcs, three times each arc:

These are the long arcs.

4. Draw over short, medium and long wavy lines, three times each line:

5. Draw lines through a single point:

6. Draw lines from one point to another:

7. Draw curved lines through multiple points:

8. Draw ellipses then add the minor axis. For all of the ellipse drills, I use a set of 10°–80° ellipse templates to check my work. The correct lines are in red:

9. Draw ellipses around a minor axis:

10. Draw ellipses inside a box focusing on making each of its quadrants equal:

11. Draw ellipses between parallel lines:

12. Draw boxes at different angles. THIS exercise is extremely difficult, forcing you to imagine a box at a variety of angles in your head:

I recommend doing these drills regularly. They've helped me with my anatomy studies especially when I want to draw over lines accurately. And I'm confident that these mechanical drawing skills will be useful once I delve further into other types of drawing.

Tell me if you've tried these drills or if you have other or better drills!
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